fire on the hill
by irnan
Summary: Her boy looks terribly disappointed when she shows him the planet she's picked for them, and if she were mortal, she might feel satisfaction: at last he'll be out of trouble for a while.


_this is a disclaimer._

_**AN:** So... all in all it's been a pretty productive weekend! *beams manically* _

_Erm, this one is mostly just crack. Blasphemous interpretations of the Prophecy Pertaining To Balancing The Force/Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi teachings of the Unifying/Living Force, and general silliness.  
_

**fire on the hill**

She spins herself into existence on a distant planet far from the well-intentioned interference even of her own servants. They have no place here: it is their petty squabbles, their arrogance and ignorance that have made this step, undertaken so rarely in her memory, necessary. If she had emotions, she would not do it gladly, but she does not, so she simply does it.

Incarnation of course changes that. Impossible to make oneself into the image of a living thing and not be influenced by the shape one has taken.

It's such a _nuisance_.

As her true self, she has no emotions, nor a morality, nor even a conscience. She has no desires, barely even a self. She is unchanging: her presence is the bedrock of existence itself.

As a human woman, she finds she understands her son better than she ever has before: his flare-ups, his flightiness, his constant inconsistencies, his ridiculous fondness for individual mortals, his joy, his pain, his pride or disappointment, his indignation, his sense of what he calls injustice.

Bah! _Injustice_. Mortal nonsense. In the end there will be only her, and Time, and her boy, a bright flame in this their galaxy, a burning brand against the empty stretches that lie between the stars and the Darkness that lives in them.

At least – that is how things should be.

Of course the boy was perfectly prepared to undertake this task without her help – truth to tell it was his idea, and he actually seemed to be looking forward to it. But he cannot spin himself a body out of nothingness as she does. Her words and will were what lit the spark in the void that gave him life, and as among the stars so among the humans.

Memory, of course, slips gradually away. It always does, although she clings to it with all her strength for as long as she can. Human biology is not built to carry within itself the wisdom of the universe. Indeed, her own incarnation undergoes several miscarriages before she is able to create within herself a body that will sustain her son's consciousness.

It exhausts her: the delicate balancing of gene against gene, the spinning of strands of DNA into a tapestry strong enough to carry her boy, not just briefly but for a full mortal lifetime, from birth to death. Her own incarnation was far easier than this.

But at last she senses her son's presence flooding the foetus in her womb, his light inside her bright with anticipation. He slips into sleep instantly, and she knows that when he wakes in nine months time nothing of his true self will remain with him. It is a risk she dare not take, for destabilising his body would mean the end of their plan, and necessitate another incarnation, the whole arduous process beginning all over again.

With a final great effort she sets the threads in motion that will bring her son's most devoted servant here, to this desert backwater, in time to become his protector when he is grown. He must not, she knows, fall into the hands of her own servants.

Quite frankly, they've botched things enough. She shudders to think of the way they would strangle her boy, dim his light and quench his fire with their duty and their visions of the future and their talk of destiny. Foolishness! They put too little effort into differentiating between herself and her son, denying her connection to him and crediting him with her tasks.

But because they are pledged to her service and attuned to her ways, she hears them and senses them and knows their influence on her, and so does her son. Every time his mother's servants turn their backs on him, another fissure opens in his very being. His wounds have become intolerable, and the Darkness is flooding into them.

Time is running out.

She touches the ugly, flushed, scrunched-up, delicate features of the newborn body that houses her son's mind and soul, and lets herself go.

* * *

Nineteen years later, she's finally released, but either making her servants see sense is proving to be more difficult than she thought or her boy is busy amusing himself with his beloved mortals.

She debates going to check on him, but there is still the question of whether or not his human form would survive the knowledge that such a meeting might impart, so she decides to trust that he knows what he's doing and goes, not without a whisper of something her mortal self would have called _relief_, back to her work. There is one particularly beautiful supernova she has not seen in far too long...

* * *

"Well, I'm home," her son says from behind her.

She makes a movement of her head, as a mortal would to flick away a fly. "I had begun to wonder if you had taken such a shine to mortality that you would stay there for good."

"Things got – complicated," he says. "Mother! Won't you even look at me?"

"I'm busy with this star, boy."

"It's just the same as all the others."

She turns after all – to glare. "And if it dies in the wrong place at the wrong time because you are indulging in your mortal silliness and distracting me, there is a distinct possibility the universe will end."

He flings himself into a chair and sulks for several months while she concentrates on the star; finally, she looks up and smiles.

"And done! Now then – is there balance?"

"Not quite," he admits. "It will take time."

She arches an eyebrow. "You've had close to half a century."

He glares. "You took away my memories!"

"Your body would not have been able to sustain the knowledge or the power that went with it," she says, exasperated. "Do you not know how difficult it was for me to bring you into the world? Every gene, every strand of DNA, every little biological detail had to be exactly right. To risk destabilising your physical form –"

"Well, you've always been a perfectionist."

"And you've always been a fool," she says bitingly. He affects a wounded look.

"Mother!"

"You know full well I speak nothing but the truth," she says flatly.

Her son sighs, tossing a star back and forth between his hands like a ball until she takes it off him. The boy is incorrigible, and completely incapable of settling down. If he was ever rendered unable to move, she thinks, he would no longer be her boy.

"There's one other thing," he says, twisting his mouth in disappointment when she puts the star away out of his reach. _It's a pout_, some remnant of her mortal self says.

"Yes?"

"There's a girl."

For an instant, the words do not quite register. Then, for the first time in all her timeless existence, she's horrified.

"Don't tell me you've gone and fallen in love with a mortal, Anakin!"

He kneels at her feet, impish, laughing, and takes her hands the way he used to as a child. "You've met her, Mom."

"That _child_," she says, contemptuous.

"Mom!"

"What?" she snaps, drawing her hands out of his. "Don't look at me like that. You know what I am, Anakin. I am all things that are, that will be, and that have been. I am the Weaver of Fates: clotho, lachesis, atropos. I came in the beginning and caused everything to come to be... I know not love, boy. I know not emotions, nor morality, nor conscience, nor desire. I am necessity in all ways, and I am union of all things."

He grasps her hands again. "Not always," he says.

"Mortal nonsense," she says, for she left such things behind her with the husk of her body when it finally died, returning to her rightful place and her true self. The echoes of Shmi Skywalker have no place here.

But he holds on tight and kisses her hand in reverence.

"Mother darling, I _am_ mortal nonsense."

He has a point.

"Anakin," she tries again, and he laughs.

"Mom, I've been incarnated half a dozen times since you span this galaxy out of the void, but you've never continued using one of those names past my returning home before."

It's true. She cannot even remember any of his other names, nor the faces he once bore. Names are things that belong to physical forms and beings; in their purest state, he is simply _her boy_ and she is only _Mother_.

But this name – Anakin. Anakin Skywalker. It means _warrior_; it means _kinless_. It means _fire_, and _life_, and, obviously, _one who walks the skies_, and a hundred other things in thousands of mortal tongues across the universe that she created and that he holds so dear.

All these things, he is. Even without the knowledge of his true self, the personality that Anakin Skywalker had is the truest representation of her boy to have existed in any of his incarnations.

In spite of herself, she blurts, "I think it suits you."

He looks delighted.

She sighs.

He grins even wider, if such a thing were possible. "Then you'll do it? You'll fetch her?"

"If you insist." It is a vain attempt to sound long-suffering.

Her boy – _Anakin_ – leaps up and hugs her. She thinks she remembers this emotion: as Shmi, she called it _joy_.

"Wait!" she says, remembering. "What of the balance?"

He grimaces. Runs a hand into his hair. "Ah. Yes. About that."

Shmi crosses her arms over her chest. "Ani!"

He looks amused suddenly. "I don't suppose you've ever given any thought to the matter of grandchildren before now?"


End file.
